”NBC isreportingthat the document was not reviewed by DHS, the Justice Department, the State Department, or the Department of Defense, and that National Security Council lawyers werepreventedfrom evaluating it. Moreover, theNew York Times writesthat Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the agencies tasked with carrying out the policy, were only given a briefing call while Trump was actually signing the order itself. Yesterday, the Department of Justice gave a ”no comment” when asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel had reviewed Trump’s executive orders—including the order at hand. (OLC normally reviews every executive order.)

This order reads to me, frankly, as though it was not reviewed by competent counsel at all.”(…)

”[I]t is most emphatically not good news to have a White House that just makes decisions with no serious thought or interagency input into what those decisions might mean. In fact, it’s really dangerous.”

”Of course admitting people from foreign lands is something with a non-zero risk. Of course it’s possible that some will enter pretending to be refugees who are in fact enemy agents. The solution to that is to defeat the enemy—not to condemn to death or slavery the vast majority of refugees who are fleeing in search of safety. To do the latter is a disgrace to everything that makes this country what it is supposed to be: a refuge and a heaven.(…)

”To emphasize: I think the Executive Order is constitutional. I think it’s stupid and immoral in every other way.

That said, it might still be illegal. Congress is the lawmaker, and Cato’s David Bier argues that the Order violates the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.”(…)

”Actual leadership, of course—leadership of the George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower variety—is about fostering others and articulating an ideal that merits support. It’s not showy; it’s patient, thoughtful, often boring, and rarely self-aggrandizing. Trump’s not intelligent enough to muster a clever plan to lure lefties into self-defeating acts. He’s just a blowhard, and a blowhard’s gonna blow hard.

Many object that the protestors were silent when Pres. Obama blocked Syrian refugees. Maybe so—although my memory is that people were outraged by that, and said so at the time. I certainly was and did.”

”Wilbur Ross, President-elect Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary, doesn’t merely espouse government planning of the economy, he lobbies for it and profits from it.

”One of the problems in our country,” Ross said in 2010, ”is we don’t have an industrial policy.” By ”industrial policy,” Ross meant federal laws that steer resources to certain sectors for certain activities.

Ross, in a CNBC interview in the summer of 2010, expressed his admiration for China’s five-year plans, the ones originated by Communist revolutionary Mao Zedong. ”Is that something we should do here, Wilbur?” journalist Andy Serwer asked.

Ross explained how he would use government to steer the economic ship: ”We ought, as a country, to decide which industries are we going to really promote — the so-called industries of the future.”[…]

This sort of industrial planning isn’t just less economically efficient than free enterprise, it’s also a recipe for cronyism — for enriching the politically connected at the expense of outsiders. Ross’s own career shows this.”